


it's my feeling we'll win in the end

by shuuuliet



Category: Psych (TV 2006)
Genre: 3x02 "Murder?...Anyone?...Anyone?...Bueller?", F/M, and an ending that leaves the door way open to canon compliance because i'm a slave to canon, i did not make up the crown thing and it shouldn't be a surprise, in which jules find out shawn stood up abigail and gets...a little too annoyed about it, like the crown thing, maybe less pine-y than my usual but that's just because jules refuses to admit how she feels, much of this fic is based off of deleted scenes that i feel like are pretty known to shules canon, oh what a surprise i'm writing pining jules, shules bc of course
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-29
Updated: 2020-07-29
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:42:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25582294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shuuuliet/pseuds/shuuuliet
Summary: When Shawn calls Juliet down to his high school reunion to investigate a murder, she's surprised to learn that she's a lot more focused on what may have happened between Shawn and his high school crush...and what it says about the Shawn SHE knows.(Or, alternatively, Juliet pines her way through Shawn's high school reunion.)
Relationships: Juliet O'Hara/Shawn Spencer
Comments: 7
Kudos: 24





	it's my feeling we'll win in the end

**Author's Note:**

> The deleted scenes from 3x02, "Murder?...Anyone?...Anyone?...Bueller?" are a veritable treasure trove, you guys. Seriously, there's 26 minutes of them on the Season 3 DVDs, and I love them all. Some of the scenes in this piece come directly from those deleted moments.
> 
> The title of this fic is a lyric from "Don't You (Forget About Me)" (1985) by Simple Minds, which, obviously, is prominently featured in The Breakfast Club. 
> 
> Oh, and I still don't own Psych, Shawn, Jules, or anything else. :)

“This is the kind of thing that should just _stay_ in high school,” Juliet thinks, standing on the outskirts of a high school gymnasium that isn’t hers while she scans for the man who made her come here in the first place.

It’s not a big deal.

Well, it shouldn’t be, and Juliet doesn’t even know why it’s bothering her. But hey, this has been a bizarre night of minor annoyances, from Shawn teasing her about her dress (it’s _not_ a prom dress, and it _doesn’t_ poof) to the fact that there doesn’t even seem to be a case, based on the interviews she’s spent her evening off doing, to the fact that Shawn, who had called her _down here_ _on her night off_ , is God-knows-where, and yet it’s _this_ , this story from…Abigail?…some girl called Abigail Lytar, that is really bugging her.

She’s been interviewing people all evening, covertly, of course, and Abigail was the first one who’d seemed to know Shawn when she’d mentioned him. Before that, it seemed like Shawn had gone to this high school about as much as Juliet had.

But then, this is Shawn, and it surprises her not at all to learn he’d probably had some issues with attendance.

Well, attendance at school at least. But this issue of attendance on his date with Abigail _is_ surprising, and even more surprising is how much it’s upsetting her.

 _Apparently_ Shawn had pestered this poor girl to go out with him for all of high school, and then he hadn’t even bothered to show up when she’d finally agreed. Juliet had been stood up herself in high school—for her _prom_ , no less—and even though it’s been ages since she thought about it, she still remembers how it had stung.

But there’s more to it, too. The pattern Abigail had described sounded just a little too familiar to Juliet—Shawn’s constant pestering, hitting on her and asking her out but not quite making a _real_ move. That hit a little close to home. And yes, that thing with Abigail had happened when he was in high school, and it was a long time ago, and it’s not like Juliet was even going to go out with Shawn anyway, so it’s not like it even matters, but it’s still just…nagging at her.

So she can’t help but tell him so, doing her best to hide the fact that this feels a little, well, _personal_ to her, even though it shouldn’t. It’s just that when she finally finds Shawn, and he asks her if she's learned anything from the interviews so far, it just feels _right_ to call him out.

“I learned _something_ ,” she tells him. “Talking to that girl Abigail Lytar? I can’t _believe_ you stood her up!” She keeps her tone light, but she knows Shawn can tell it's bugging her.

“What?” Shawn asks, and she’s a little pleased to see that he’s genuinely surprised. It takes a lot to surprise a psychic, after all.

“That is the worst possible thing you can do to a girl, Shawn! Abigail is still hurt by it,” she says, hating that she’s having to remind herself that she’s talking about Abigail.

“What do you want me to do, Jules? It was thirteen years ago,” he says, in a why-are-we-talking-about-this kind of voice, clearly impatient to get back to talking about the so-called case.

“ _I_ don’t care what you do,” she says, ignoring the fact that it doesn’t even sound like the truth to _her_ , “but the right thing is to apologize to her! You need to go up to her and look her in the eye and... say, ‘Abigail, I am sorry I planted a seed of hurt in your heart that grew for thirteen years, tangling and choking your trust in men and your ability to open yourself up and bloom’!”

Okay, so maybe that was a little over the top, but at least it got his attention. Shawn sighs. “Okay, I’ll do it,” he says.

“Oh, my God, you will?”

“No!” he says indignantly, giving her the trademark ‘c’mon, son!’ look he usually reserves for Gus. “What, are you insane? I can’t say that!”

They’re walking again, through the crowd, and Juliet can tell Shawn’s only half-focused on their conversation; he’s clearly looking for something or someone elsewhere in the gym. But she’s keeping up with him, scanning the room as he does to look for what he’s seeing.

“You’re taking this awfully personally, aren’t you?” he asks, suddenly.

Juliet stops in her tracks, turning around. Shawn looks at her intently, and she can almost see the wheels turning in his head, the pieces coming together.

“We wouldn’t happen to be talking about _you_ , would we?” he continues.

Juliet huffs, blowing him off, trying to look unaffected. But he’s hit right on target, as usual. 

But Shawn’s not finished. “Did you get stood up at your prom?” he asks. She hates that he’s seen through her this easily. Sometimes, that’s one of her favorite things about Shawn, that his ability to read her is uncanny, and it’s part of what makes them such good friends, what makes them work together so well, but this time it’s just annoying.

So she’s not going to let him have it. She pretends to be amused by the mere suggestion. “Why would you even ask me that?” she asks. Damn it, that sounded too defensive.

Shawn notices, too, so he puts his hand to his head in his usual “I’m-psychic” gesture. _Damn_ it. That means he _knows_ he’s right.

“Ugh,” she says, still refusing to confirm. “Shawn, you’re an idiot.”

He’s not, though. Right now, she hates that he’s not.

So, her only move left is to deflect, which is usually _his_ game, not hers, but hey, two can play this time. “Look,” she says, “I came down here, I put on this dress, and I am telling you, there’s no case. So, unless you can come up with something, I’m going to do one more electric slide, then I’m out of here.”

He frowns at her, but he’s back in it. This is about the case again, _finally_. “Jules,” he says firmly, “you’re not hearing me. Someone was murdered here tonight, and whoever that is, they’re dead. They’re not coming back.”

Juliet sighs, but nods, considering. They're back on the case again, and that’s probably for the best. It’s certainly better than talking about Abigail, or about her own prom incident, even though she’s still not quite over the fact that Shawn read her so easily, that he was so quickly able to discern what had happened to her, and that he called her out for taking the Abigail incident personally.

Although, to be fair, he hadn’t seemed to see the _other_ reason it felt personal for her, and that was _definitely_ for the best. Whatever this thing is between him and her—the sparks that were sometimes so clear and sometimes seemed like nothing--it was better for him not to know that she was, at this very moment, tracking their patterns in her head, trying more desperately than she’d like to to find a reason why what Shawn does to her at the station every day is somehow different from what he’d done to Abigail all those years ago.

“Jules,” Shawn says again, snapping her back to attention. “I’m running out of time to solve this thing, and it is turning into a real rattlesnake. Now, come on.” In one fluid motion, his arm slides around her back and he steers her over to a nearby couple. “Oh, my God!” he exclaims, as they approach, “it’s Howie and Eileen!”

Juliet blinks for a second, then shakes her head. How Shawn does that, she’ll never know, but he’s a master at pulling her back in again, just when she thinks she’s seen through his charisma or escaped his shenanigans. And yet, here she is, standing with this couple she doesn’t know, and she’s somehow found herself back on the-case-that’s-not-a-case, and it’s almost enough of a blur for her not to notice the feel of Shawn’s arm on her back, but not quite.

It’s never _quite_ enough, with him, for these details to escape her.

But, she’s a cop, and Shawn’s arm is around her because she is a cop, and he is their cover, and they are on—well, sort of on—a case. So, she clears her mind of the pseudo-argument/whatever it was she and Shawn just had and does what she does best—becomes a detective.

And if later, she gets distracted again, so she goes off on Shawn to Carlton because he’d stood up Abigail and who _does_ that, then so what? Really, _someone_ else needs to know that Shawn was ridiculous in high school, and Carlton is probably the best for that, because he won’t step in to defend Shawn.

So, she does just that, when Carlton pulls her aside to ask her if she’s _really_ taking Shawn’s case seriously.

“Don’t tell me you think something bad is going on here,” he says, when she tells him she’s been investigating. As usual, he never takes Shawn’s side.

“Yeah, I do think something bad is going on here,” she says, “Do you realize Shawn stood Abigail Lytar up? Who _does_ that?”

She walks away, leaving Carlton bewildered behind her, but it’s enough to get it out of her system, enough to clear her head so she can get back to investigating. 

She has a harder time clearing her head later, when she’s watching Shawn on the stage. He’s unraveling the case—there _was_ a case, after all, he was right again--now it's his turn to do what _he_ does best, and from her vantage point, she can see that he’s drawing Abigail Lytar in again.

He has a real talent for doing that, she has to admit. He always manages to draw people back in again, even after making them want to pull their hair out only moments before.

Shawn wraps up the case, impressing everyone, because of _course_ , and she and Carlton handcuff Howie and Eileen, before passing them off to a couple of officers who are actually on duty.

Afterwards, she and Carlton return to the crowd. She’s not totally sure why either of them are staying, exactly, but Shawn’s still charming everyone from the stage, and part of her just wants to see what he’ll do next.

What he _does_ do next is somehow the biggest of all the big surprises that evening. She’s half-watching, half-listening as Gus explains to his classmates that since the reunion prom queen and king—Howie and Eileen—are unable to fill their roles, they have to appoint the runners-up to take over the prom court duties. Her interest is waning as she watches Shawn hand Gus the piece of paper with the runner-up’s name on it.

And yet, a second later, her interest peaks, as Gus announces that the reunion prom queen is… “Juliet…O’Hara?”

Gus’ confusion is perhaps only topped by her own, but she can’t help but smile. This is how Shawn does it, how he _always_ does it, pulling her back in just when she thinks she’s seen the last trick up his sleeve. It’s all happening so fast, then, the crowd turning to look at the spotlight on her, one woman nearby grumbling that she didn’t even go to their school (which, Juliet thinks, is _fair)_ , and Shawn’s clapping up there on the stage. Carlton pushes her up towards the stage, and then suddenly she’s standing up there with Shawn, the plastic crown in his hands, and he’s smiling at her, and they’re back to their old “is-something-going-on-between-us-or-am-I-insane” again. It’s just like they never weren’t.

Her heart flutters a little as he places the crown on her head, his hands lingering a bit too long to straighten it just so. She chooses to ignore it, chalking the butterflies up to the realization of a leftover high school dream. It’s more than that, of course, the same way that that Abigail thing is more than that, but now isn’t the time to reflect on _that_.

“I’m sure this is what would have happened if you hadn’t missed your prom,” he says. She shakes her head a little in amused exasperation at him, but he’s looking into her eyes so kindly that she can’t help but feel warm inside. It’s his way of apologizing for what happened earlier, she realizes. It wasn’t like they’d had a real argument, but he dug a little too much and she got a little too defensive, and even though it wasn’t a big deal, he feels bad, and his gentle, apologetic smile is endearing her to him more than she’s comfortable with.

And then Shawn turns away to help Gus announce the reunion prom king, and she suddenly remembers she’s on a stage, and the room is crowded with people. For a second, looking at him, she’d forgotten about all of that. Shawn has a way of _doing_ that; he has as long as she’s known him. Sometimes he’ll run into the station yelling something like “everyone, stop what you’re doing and pay attention only to me!” and Juliet has always wondered why he even has to bother calling everyone’s attention to himself. Nine times out of ten, after all, one can’t help _but_ focus only on Shawn when he’s in the room. Something about him just transforms everything else into background noise.

The rest of the night passes in a series of weird moments. She does the requisite dance with the new prom king, one of the nerdy guys Shawn had been standing with when she’d found him at the lockers earlier, and somehow that moment just endears her to Shawn all the more, because she knows that this guy hasn’t won the crown fair and square either, it’s just a small kindness that Shawn would never admit to.

As it turns out, he won’t admit to hers, either. At the end of the night—somehow, she’s stayed until the end of the night—she approaches him. He’s standing at the refreshment table, watching the few remaining people (the cleaning committee, no doubt, which he’s pretending to be an active part of, probably to appease Gus) begin to clean up the gym.

“Shawn,” she says, “about that crown--”

He raises his eyebrow at her but doesn’t say anything.

“It just…it was really sweet of you to do that for me,” she says.

“I’m pretty sure the votes tallied out to you,” he says, smirking at her.

“Really? Because _I’m_ pretty sure, seeing as I didn’t even go to this school, my name could have only gotten in there if someone rigged the vote at the end.”

“Hmmm,” Shawn frowns, but his eyes are twinkling. “I’d say you might just have had a secret admirer at the reunion, Jules. Well, a whole bunch of them, more like…that must have taken a lot of votes, after all.”

“Uh-huh,” she responds, tilting her head and smiling at him. “So, you’re sure it wasn’t just rigged at the end?”

“Hmm,” he hums again, “I’ve heard it both ways.”

She smiles at him, puts her hand on his arm for a second, below where his sleeve has been rolled up. The contact sends a shiver up through her, which she wasn’t expecting. He looks up at her, smiling softly. She wonders if he felt that current, too. “Thank you,” she whispers.

He shrugs, trying to play it cool. “What was I supposed to do, Jules? _Actually_ give it to a murderer?” But he’s still smiling softly as he says it, hands in his pockets, his eyes now looking down at the ground.

There’s a shyness to him sometimes, a softness, that she adores. She loves the Shawn that runs wild around the station, driving Carlton insane and making her giggle, but it’s _this_ Shawn, the quiet, sensitive, sweetness that she only gets to see on occasion that really intrigues her. She likes the gentle sincerity in him, wonders how many people have ever seen it. Something about standing there with him, in a shy Shawn moment like this one, feels like a great privilege, a private part of him he’s letting her in on, while the rest of the world only sees the Judd Nelson pinned to his breast pocket. 

She shakes her head to clear it. It’s been a long, bizarre night, and she’s being ridiculous. It was a plastic crown, after all, not an engagement ring. He gives her an odd look.

“So,” he says, finally, after they’ve been quiet a touch too long, “you want to get some pancakes?”

She purses her lips, considering. “I could do pancakes.”

He laughs. “I never _did_ get to take out the prom queen, this…feels sort of like that.”

“It’s not a date, Shawn,” she says gently. She half-means it.

She had thought about it, after all, a couple of times tonight, even in the midst of everything else that had gone on. She’d thought about it when she’d first arrived, and those guys by the trophy case had teased Shawn about her. He hadn’t denied it when they’d called her “his girl”, and she hadn’t either—at the time, she’d told herself it was because, even though Shawn hadn’t exactly _asked_ her to pretend to be his date, she hadn’t wanted to blow his cover. The truth of the matter was that it had felt…nice? To be referred to as Shawn’s? Oh, God, she’d been single too long.

But she hadn’t denied it, then, and later, as he’d put his arm around her and pulled her over to interview Eileen and Howie, not exactly pretending to be together, but not exactly _not_ together, well, that had felt pretty nice then, too, regardless of the whole Abigail thing.

Somehow, since the moment Shawn had placed that crown on her head, she’d kind of forgotten about the whole Abigail thing. It was a big deal at the beginning of the night, and yet somehow it hardly seemed to matter now. How very high school.

It’s just that something told her that the Shawn that stood up girls he cared about just couldn’t quite be the same Shawn that went out of his way in such a big way to apologize for a perceived hurt, or to heal someone’s broken prom experience. The Shawn that stood people up wasn’t the same Shawn who’d make the night of a nerdy guy from high school, just because he could, and then never admit to doing so.

 _This_ Shawn was different from the one who’d stood up Abigail. How different, she’s not sure, but, she realizes, she wants to stay and find out. Shawn just has that way of pulling her in.

She lets him slip his arm around her again, though, steer her off towards the gym doors—beyond which, pancakes await—and it _does_ feel, to the part of Juliet that remembers how it was to be a high schooler (and, okay, to adult Juliet, too), a little bit like getting a date with the prom king.

But she’ll never admit that to him.

Some secrets, after all, should be left behind in high school gyms. Even _if_ , she reflects, as they walk past the spot where she’d stood searching for Shawn after talking to Abigail, those high school gyms are not even your own.

**Author's Note:**

> I gotta say, some of those scenes were probably deleted because they made this episode a tricky one for characterization. I struggled through this fic. Some of the scenes are some of my favorites that I've written as of yet, and some of my favorite Jules-is-in-love-with-Shawn-and-won't-admit-it-to-herself moments are in here, but by and large, I'm not crazy about this one. 
> 
> I still love comments, though, so I'd love to hear your thoughts!


End file.
